Basically, I’m not even 100% sure this is a Gradle issue, but as it’s a Gradle exception (and looks like it’s the bundled asm lib failing to load a Java 8 class), I thought this was a good place to start

Java 8 requires ASM 5, which is currently in alpha. You may want to run with Java 7 and only compile against 8. Right now, the only way to achieve this is to set ‘compileJava.options.forkOptions.executable’.